I stepped into my first cave at about age 9, with my Dad and about 17 (it seemed like) flashlights between us. With that first trip I was hooked, and have been ever since! We looked at formations, he explained the no touch rule, and last year I got to take my wife and daughter into their first cave. The closing of public caves led me to do some research, which eventually led me here. I'm considering joining a local grotto, but have a few questions. Mainly, what is the understood etiquitte in sharing cave locations? I know where several are, largely unexplored except by locals, on private land. This area of the world is covered in them!

It seems like a lot of people think, "Don't share locations with anyone, except me." Of course, forum rules state that locations should not be posted, and that is a very good thing. If you want to privately share locations with interested, responsible persons, this is probably a decent place to find them.

Welcome to the forum. I like you live in "da Ozarks. I belong to the Ozark Highlands Grotto. We meet at the Greene Co library (So Campbell) on the first Wednesday of each month at 7:00pm (usually in one of the first 2 meeting rooms on the left) as you enter the building. We would love you to check us out. We as a grotto are very careful with cave locations because private landowner relationships take time for mutual trust to develop, and like you said, since public land caves are closed, we protect our private ones even more. We are also involved in cave surveying and restoration.

Thanks for the welcome. I'll definately try to make it to a meeting sometime, I'm only about 25 mins from Springfield. It will probably be early fall before I do though... not much free time in the summer!

Welcome to the Missouri caving family, Jason! Sharing cave locations? Ok with people you trust, not OK with people you don't or with the public in general through the Internet. You might be interested in sharing the locations with someone in the grotto, (generally the MSS (state cave survey) rep) who can look up your caves. Best way to locate them is take a GPS to the entrance and get a latitude/longitude reading.

There are 6300 caves with known locations in Missouri... the only way to find out if you really have a "new" cave is to compare the location to the list of known ones. Get with a local grotto, get to know some folks you think you can trust and then share. The MSS representative for the grotto can usually be trusted not to share your location before you want them known, and can help see if it is a "new" cave or not. Occasionally you get a bad apple as MSS Rep, but there have been fewer than a half dozen people in 55 years who have served as a MSS Rep and who proved untrustworthy when it came to location dispersal. That's pretty good odds.

whetstone wrote:Thanks for the welcome. I'll definately try to make it to a meeting sometime, I'm only about 25 mins from Springfield. It will probably be early fall before I do though... not much free time in the summer!

Teresa wrote:Welcome to the Missouri caving family, Jason! Sharing cave locations? Ok with people you trust, not OK with people you don't or with the public in general through the Internet. You might be interested in sharing the locations with someone in the grotto, (generally the MSS (state cave survey) rep) who can look up your caves. Best way to locate them is take a GPS to the entrance and get a latitude/longitude reading.

There are 6300 caves with known locations in Missouri... the only way to find out if you really have a "new" cave is to compare the location to the list of known ones. Get with a local grotto, get to know some folks you think you can trust and then share. The MSS representative for the grotto can usually be trusted not to share your location before you want them known, and can help see if it is a "new" cave or not. Occasionally you get a bad apple as MSS Rep, but there have been fewer than a half dozen people in 55 years who have served as a MSS Rep and who proved untrustworthy when it came to location dispersal. That's pretty good odds.

I don't suspect I have any "new" caves (although that would be cool), every one I know of was shown to me by someone else. They're most likely not mapped, though. Since I'm always looking for something new to explore, I was wondering if grottos took a "show me yours and I'll show you mine" approach. Sounds like there are some common knowledge locations, and a few that people keep pretty close to their vest, as it should be.